When Chiara Scotti, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, took the podium at the 6th Dolomiti Macro Meeting in Bozen on 20 June 2026, she did so against a backdrop that was as symbolically charged as it was intellectually ambitious. The alpine town, perched at the junction of Italian and Germanic European cultures, provided a fitting stage for a speech that sought to bridge two worlds rarely in close enough conversation: academic macroeconomics and the operational realities of central banking. At the center of that bridge stood one of the most consequential monetary technology projects of our era — the digital euro.
The meeting itself, organized jointly by the Free University of Bozen, the BI Norwegian Business School, and the Centre for Applied Macroeconomics and Commodity Prices (CAMP), represents precisely the kind of institutional collaboration that Scotti's remarks appeared designed to celebrate and reinforce. Now in its sixth edition, the Dolomiti Macro Meeting has established itself as a forum where theoretical rigour meets policy urgency — a combination increasingly rare and increasingly necessary as central banks navigate the most complex monetary landscape in decades.
Scotti's framing of the digital euro within a dialogue between academia and central banks is itself a strategic signal. The European Central Bank's digital euro project has advanced considerably in its preparation phase, and what has become evident is that the technical and economic questions it raises — around privacy, financial inclusion, monetary transmission, and the architecture of retail payments — are not ones that central banks can resolve in isolation. The invocation of the Winter Olympics in the speech's title is more than rhetorical flourish; it suggests a theme of coordinated effort, precision under pressure, and the melding of individual expertise into collective achievement.
The Bank for International Settlements, which published the speech on 1 July 2026, has itself been a consistent advocate for grounding central bank digital currency (CBDC) design in robust empirical and theoretical research. The BIS Innovation Hub and its associated working papers have repeatedly emphasized that the viability of a retail CBDC depends not only on political will but on getting the economic architecture right — a task that demands active collaboration with the academic community. Scotti's address at Bozen fits neatly within that intellectual tradition.
For the digital euro specifically, the stakes of that academic-central bank dialogue are exceptionally high. Retail CBDC design involves trade-offs that are deeply macroeconomic in nature: how holding limits are set will influence disintermediation risk for commercial banks; how the instrument is remunerated will affect monetary policy transmission; and how privacy is balanced against anti-money laundering compliance will shape public trust and adoption rates. These are not engineering questions. They are questions that require the kind of dynamic modelling, empirical calibration, and institutional economics that academic macroeconomists are uniquely positioned to provide.
Scotti's choice of venue is also noteworthy from a European federalism perspective. Bozen — or Bolzano — sits in the South Tyrol, a historically bilingual autonomous region that has long navigated questions of identity, governance, and integration within the broader European framework. Hosting a conversation about the digital euro, a project that is fundamentally about deepening European monetary union through technological means, in this particular city carries a quiet but unmistakable resonance. It is a reminder that the architecture of European money is inseparable from the architecture of European solidarity.
What emerges from the context of this address is a portrait of a central banking community that is increasingly aware of its own epistemological limits — and is actively seeking to fill them. The digital euro is not merely a payments instrument; it is a macroeconomic intervention of the first order, one that will reshape the relationship between citizens, commercial banks, and the sovereign issuer of money. Getting that intervention right demands exactly the kind of open, iterative, evidence-based dialogue that forums like the Dolomiti Macro Meeting are designed to enable.
What This Means for the Digital Euro's Trajectory
Scotti's remarks at the 6th Dolomiti Macro Meeting signal that the Bank of Italy — one of the eurozone's most analytically rigorous national central banks — views academic engagement not as a peripheral activity but as a core input into digital euro policy design. As the ECB moves deeper into the preparation phase of its CBDC project, the voices coming from institutions like CAMP, the BI Norwegian Business School, and the Free University of Bozen will carry real weight in shaping the instrument's final architecture. Central bankers and macroeconomists, it appears, are increasingly training together — much like athletes preparing for a shared stage.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.